A seismic shift in the competitive Linux container and Kubernetes orchestration solutions landscape occurred on January 30th, 2018 with the announcement from Red Hat, Inc. that the company had finalized a deal to acquire CoreOS, along with their complete software portfolio & staff of 130 programming experts, for a price of $250 million USD. CoreOS has been a leading innovator in the open source community for data center management tools with the production of Container Linux, rkt, etcd, Flannel, & the Tectonic platform for Kubernetes cluster servers. Along with these resources, Red Hat also purchased the Quay.io private Docker registry service which CoreOS acquired in 2014 and used to start their NYC office. CoreOS was founded in 2013 in Palo Alto by Alex Polvi (CEO), Brandon Philips (CTO), and Michael Marineau. CoreOS had previously raised a total of $48 million USD from Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others to fund their start-up operations. Joe Fernandes, senior director of OpenShift Product Management at Red Hat summed up the rationale behind the acquisition by stating, "We see tremendous synergy both in our open source cultures and across our respective product portfolios." CoreOS's leading enterprise customers such as Verizon, eBay, Salesforce, Veritas, & Ticketmaster will also be migrated gradually to integrated Kubernetes and Linux container services managed by Red Hat.

One of the most interesting announcements made at the KubeCon in Austin this year was the unveiling of Kata Containers, a combination of the new Intel Clear Container software and Hyper.sh's runV technology. Clear Containers are part of Intel's Open Source Initiative and linked to the Clear Linux project, a light-weight distro optimized for cloud servers and IoT devices. HyperHQ was founded by Xu Wang, Simon Xue, & Feng Gao in Beijing in 2014, producing a hybrid container/hypervisor technology that allows for virtual machines (VMs) to run in Docker/Kubernetes deployments with extremely fast boot times and better security isolation for multi-tenant requirements. Arjan van de Ven, who works with the Intel Clear Containers group, wrote that this framework can launch a secure container with a running VM in "under 150 milliseconds" and that "the per-container memory overhead is roughly 18 to 20MB (this means you can run over 3500 of these on a server with 128GB of RAM)." The further development of Kata Containers will be governed by the OpenStack Foundation as part of the Open Cloud Initiative and the project has already developed a significant amount of support from IT industry majors (99cloud, AWcloud, Canonical, China Mobile, City Network, CoreOS, Dell/EMC, EasyStack, Fiberhome, Google, Huawei, JD.com, Mirantis, NetApp, Red Hat, SUSE, Tencent, Ucloud, UnitedStack, & ZTE). Due to the increasing popularity of using Docker & Kubernetes as web standards on cloud servers in DevOps, there is a large demand from enterprise companies for these solutions which allow for multi-tenant apps to be run with better security in containers as well as allowing developers to build solutions with multiple operating systems running simultaneously in different pods. Other solutions to this problem are KubeVirt (a Kubernetes plugin for better VM support) and Virtlet (produced by Mirantis for use with OpenContrail and Calico). Programmers and systems administrators can use software defined networking tools and the Kubernetes Pod API to create innovative solutions for modernizing legacy software applications or new strategies for complex web & mobile apps hosted in a private/public cloud.

Cognitive Computing includes elements from Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning (DL), and Machine Learning (ML), primarily through a combination of training neural networks from data sets and processing information through established algorithms. Decades of research in computer science internationally has led to major advances in using this technology in practical ways, for example: robotics, data mining, speech recognition, autonomous or self-driving vehicle navigation, pharmaceutical discovery, image/video processing, risk management, complex system modeling, meme generation, customer behavior pattern discernment, product recommendations in ecommerce, etc. Neural Networks date back as far as 1944 to the work of Warren McCullough & Walter Pitts (University of Chicago/MIT), forming key aspects of the Cybernetics (1940-60s), Connectionism (1980-90s), and Deep Learning (2006-present) movements. Recent developments in cloud computing and hardware design have led to IT majors and Fortune 500 corporations implementing an "AI-First" strategy, where companies like eBay, Uber, SAP, Dropbox, AirBNB, Snapchat, Twitter, Qualcomm, ARM, and many others have already invested heavily in launching live production applications. In 2017, NVIDIA, Google, AWS, IBM, Facebook, AMD, and Microsoft all made major announcements about new AI/ML/DL platform technology, including for the first time making this advanced hardware available to businesses, researchers, and developers on the cloud computing model to integrate with existing web hosting and data center tools. These platforms also scale to perform as supercomputers in High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, processing "big data" in real-time and solving complex math, science, and research problems through the power of new GPU/TPU chip designs optimized for ML requirements.

Docker was founded in 2010 by Solomon Hykes as an internal project of the PaaS company dotCloud and part of the Y Combinator start-up fund. In 2013, Benjamin Golub joined the company as CEO and the pair navigated a hugely successful pivot to focus on container software development, leading to a total of $237 million USD in venture capital seed funding in Silicon Valley. According to Sramana Mitra, Docker received funding from Goldman Sachs, Coatue, Northern Trust, Lightspeed Venture Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Sequoia Capital, Jerry Yang, and Insight Venture Partners, ultimately leading to a valuation of the company of over $1.3 billion USD and "unicorn" status. Kubernetes was first announced in 2014 as an open source project growing out of Google's internal "Borg" platform, with version 1.0 released in 2015 under the management of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes automates cloud orchestration for containerized applications, allowing them to scale beyond the single server model to support the highest levels of enterprise web traffic. Both Docker and Kubernetes have seen huge adoption across all business sectors internationally in the last few years, becoming the foundation of best practices in DevOps as companies seek to modernize their legacy software applications and transition to fully embrace advanced cloud computing web server architecture. This year, Steve Singh moved from his role as Docker's Chairman of the Board to replace Golub as the CEO of the company.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) hosted their 6th Annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this year with over 40,000 people attending conference sessions and 60,000+ watching the proceedings on livestreams. Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, and Werner Vogels, VP & CTO at Amazon.com, both gave extensive keynote addresses introducing the major new product announcements. The highlights of the sessions were the unveiling of a new Elastic Kubernetes Cloud Service platform (EKS) along with the Fargate administration service for container management and cloud orchestration. AWS also announced several major new cloud services that can be used by developers in their applications for live, real-time transcription of audio/video through speech-to-text processing based on Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) which can be used for translation of data to different languages. AWS further increased the number of ways that programmers can build upon the Alexa platform for voice recognition in their applications, as well as unveiling a new DeepLens technology in partnership with Intel which represents a quick and easy way for businesses to get started building smart image & video recognition technology into their platforms using Sagemaker & Greengrass with Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) through a number of built in AI/ML/DL algorithms. With $18 billion in annual revenue at AWS, 42% year-on-year business growth, and millions of active customers, Jassy summarized the developments by stating that "nobody has close to the functionality that AWS has" on their hosting platform at this time, including the comparable services offered by Microsoft, Google, IBM, & Oracle.

Currently Top 3 Hosting Companies

Web Hosting Reviews

HostAdvice.com provides professional web hosting reviews fully independent of any other entity. Our reviews are unbiased, honest, and apply the same evaluation standards to all those reviewed.While monetary compensation is received from a few of the companies listed on this site, compensation of services and products have no influence on the direction or conclusions of our reviews. Nor does the compensation influence our rankings for certain host companies.This compensation covers account purchasing costs, testing costs and royalties paid to reviewers.